Certain fabrications using uranium products employ a uranium-niobium alloy. The uranium is actually depleted uranium: 99.8% .sup.238 U and 0.2% .sup.235 U. Presently, depleted uranium requires burial in a special licensed site for low-level radioactive wastes. This form of disposal is expensive due to the loss of the niobium and to a lesser extent to the loss of uranium, and also due to the cost of operating the licensed burial site. There is a high cost associated with the burial of low-level radioactive waste. It has risen dramatically over the past several years to over $60 per cubic foot and forecasts indicate a future cost of as much as approximately $300 per cubic foot at certain sites. The uranium-niobium allow cannot be simply containerized or buried: it must first be treated and packaged so that it is non-leachable, non-corrosible and non-pyrophoric. The preferred method of meeting such problems in the past was to recycle the material that was uncontaminated by oxides and impurities. One attempt at recycling recovers the scrap by remelting it and reusing in the original process. But a substantial amount of the material is not amenable to remelting because it will suffer from contaminations from the manufacturing process, as well as oxidation during the manufacturing process. The material that cannot be recycled in the past may require burial by encapsulation.